The Securities and Exchange Commission's (SEC) January 10 deadline for a spot bitcoin ETF decision is less than a week away. Still pending approval, a green light by SEC regulators would allow firms to offer traders bitcoin (BTC-USD) ETFs, such as Grayscale's Bitcoin Trust (GBTC).

VettaFi Financial Futurist Dave Nadig sits down with Yahoo Finance Live's Julie Hyman and Josh Lipton in-studio to discuss the possibilities of SEC approval, calling it a "horse race" to have ETF offerings ready to go on the first available trading day.

"I don't think that this is going to be one of those things where we immediately have $10 billion in new assets show up," Nadig says on demand. "Remember, one of the funds here is Graycale's GBTC converting. It already has $25 billion in it, so we know what that demand looks like."

For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Yahoo Finance Live.

Editor's note: This article was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.

Video Transcript

[AUDIO LOGO]

JULIE HYMAN: The clock is ticking down now for an SEC approval of a spot Bitcoin ETF in the US in the coming days. The crypto world is going to find out whether 14 different money managers and ETF issuers will be allowed to launch their own spot bitcoin exchange traded funds. Here with what this will mean for crypto traders and what we can expect, Dave Nadig is still with us, VettaFi financial futurist.

This has really been the big topic in the ETF world for the past six months, I don't know. But it's obviously heated up. January 10th is the deadline we're looking at, because that's when the SEC has to give some sort of answer to one issuer, in particular, ARC and 21shares. But the anticipation is we'll get an answer on all of them.

DAVE NADIG: Yeah, absolutely.

JULIE HYMAN: So what's your-- what is the next week, two weeks, month going to look like on this?

DAVE NADIG: I suspect the next thing we'll see is that both the exchanges that are going to have to trade these products and the issuers will finish up their paperwork. There's a couple of different forms that have to get filed. That's when we'll get a bunch of information like, what are the expense ratios going to be? We still don't know that. These things could come out free. They could come out at 2% We have no idea.

I think everybody's thinking around 50 basis points is probably the over, under on that. But we have no idea. So we'll get that when we see that from the issuers. Then we'll get the approval for these things to trade. And the SEC may or may not give a hard date there to say, everybody can start trading say on January 21. They may simply say, all right, everybody, go, in which case, we might see some of these things start trading next week. We might see a bit of a horse race to see who has their capital markets desk lined up first. And some folks may be ready at 9:30 on one trading day. And other folks may not be able to trade until noon just because there are a lot of operational considerations in getting any ETF off the ground.